Thanks Jarno - looks a great spot. I've often seen Mt Stokes from Picton, and from sailing on Queen Charlotte Sound and paddling on Pelorus. When a Wellingtonian I thought it handy enough and wouldn't it be a good to pick a spell of fine weather and sleep the night on the summit there - not just to spread the effort of climbing and descending to ease the body strain, but with that mosaic of water and land all around, what a place to see the sunset from and then dawn-sunrise!

New Year's Eve, a pumice-sand beach without footprints on the northern side of Lake Waikareiti - perched at 900 m altitude in the beech forest above Waikaremoana. Tent set up a few metres behind in the bush. The sunset colours are understated as the few clouds are fitted into the landscape, the fire muted also as I'm starting off frying pieces of bacon in its own fat, the resulting smell is picking up, and the first morepork of the evening called a minute ago.

Late morning, all packed up and ready to leave for the trackless bush behind me - a farewell photo of Waikareiti. If you can see an emphasis that here the bush, the lake, the sky, the beach sand, the hills, the islands - all these elements and every pair of them are unusually close in an integrated whole - then that's exactly what I was thinking.

I'm glad the cooking fire appeals to the senses. I was reluctant to walk on the beach at first, to leave my footprints, then settled on a fire there as leaving a more quickly passing impact, and a single line to the water's edge for ... water. And in the morning I carefully walked on one end of the little beach to access and enjoy the bush edge details, but still with a not-quite-guilty sense of awareness I was changing the place. Then looking at one of my great boot-prints on the sand, I saw on its edge this lovely arrangement of beech leaves, that I had unwittingly almost destroyed - a fresh new red beech leaf and an old silver beech leaf as if artfully placed on an old red beech leaf. So I photographed them and their near-miss in their context of other debris from the bush overhead fallen onto the sand in the last rain and wind.

Then in the photo detail enlarged, I saw a beautifully round grain of sand artfully placed on the leaf too. It's unlike all the other grains of pumice. I'm a geologist - they are from big eruptions of Taupo 1800 and 3500 years ago, washed out of the soils of the bush slopes adjoining, whereas that smaller pearly white round grain is of quartz, washed off the surface of a sandstone boulder exposed on the lakeshore, a boulder that is part of the hummocky debris of an enormous landslide from 18,000 years ago, where the original sandstone itself was around 10 million years old, but this grain of sand within it was far older, having been through several earlier geological cycles to round it so well. How did it land on those delicate leaves? I rather think it had just sprung a few millimetres from the sand disturbed by the edge of my boot. So any trace of not-quite-guilt was gone - I have seen a world in a grain of sand, and enhanced my understanding of what happens when a leaf falls in a forest with and without someone around to hear it.

And time for a chapter break - good to see some others! So for something different from me - this is not a crime scene, but still the aftermath of violence, recorded late this afternoon.

It was pretty warm in Gisborne today, light winds and 33+degs in good shade at my place, no doubt markedly hotter in direct sun on the concrete path by the plum tree. Said tree produces beautiful big dark juicy tasty plums, and has excelled itself this year - much direct eating, supplying 5 neighbours etc with bagfuls, numerous bottles stewed and stashed, the birds getting their share and still the plums fall in excess of consumption. This one rolled out from the shade of the tree onto concrete, whose edging shows my lack of application to the suburban lawnmaster's creed. No bird had pecked its skin. So as it stewed whole in the sun the pressure built up until - well there is the evidence of a violent explosion, guts propelled afar, the skin collapsed back on itself.

Nearby, to further emphasize the precarious hold of humanity on earth, this monstrosity seems almost ill-fated to me, considering I've observed all of the catastrophes below it over a 30 year period, the tree was once upright, the enormous boulder on the beach was what made that cave in the face, the cracks have all widened.

But it won't be long before something like the "Stairway to Heaven" (which at the bottom end is simply a rocky crag) is added, I expect. I think that ridge was pines before. Now it's riparian rights gone mad - the house is only about 100m along the road from the council access to the actual beach, and in the other direction to Fisherman's Point.

But nothing can really top the scar made by this, in which the owners were so determined to get their sea access that they caused the entire face to slip away, and have spent the last 5 years building retaining walls to keep their house out of the ocean.